The search for a driver accused of running down a pair of elderly women over the weekend ended surprisingly at the Santa Clara library on Monday, after a tip from an unlikely hero: a quick-thinking librarian.

Librarian Karen Saunders was reading about the tragic hit-and-run on the Mercury News Web site just before 10 a.m. when she realized that last week she had talked with the wanted man – Cecil Cox, 66. Astonished, she looked around the library and thought she saw him again.

She turned away for a moment but didn’t see him when she looked back. That’s when she ran downstairs to the library garage with the car description and license plate number in hand. And there it was – the 1994 silver Infiniti that witnesses say struck and killed Oralia Puga Ramirez, 73, and Enedina Oliva, 70, on Saturday night.

“I immediately came upstairs and called police,” Saunders said.

A minute after they arrived, police found Cox at a computer surfing the Internet and took him away.

“We have a million visitors to the library each year,” Saunders said. “But I did recognize his name.”

Police say Cox was calm when they approached him. He had been living out of his car, they said.

Cox had been sought since Saturday night, after witnesses described the shocking scene at the crosswalk of Stevens Creek Boulevard at Cypress Avenue. They said one of the women ended up on the hood of the car and was carried for about 400 feet until the driver slowed and reached “out his window and kind of pushed her off the vehicle,” said Santa Clara Police Sgt. Kurt Clarke.

Witnesses also told officers the make of the car and the license plate: It matched Cox’s 1994 silver Infiniti, license plate number 3JXW237.

And it helped Saunders find Cox on Monday – a memorable way to mark her 33rd anniversary of working for the city.

Saunders said she had talked to Cox in the library on Homestead Road last week about “an issue unrelated to anything that happened Saturday,” but she declined to say what it was.

“Our hearts go out to the families of the victims,” she said. “I’m glad we were able to help apprehend the suspect so this won’t happen to some other family.”

Clarke said Cox was booked on two counts of hit-and-run and two counts of vehicular manslaughter. An arraignment time had not been set as of late Monday.

The two women were in the westbound lanes of Stevens Creek about 8:20 p.m. Saturday when they were hit by a car. They were in the crosswalk, police said.

Ramirez and Oliva had become friends about two years before and loved walking together, but “they were terrified of that intersection,” said Tim Dempsey, Ramirez’s former son-in-law.

“These are two elderly ladies who can’t move very well,” he said. “On a few occasions, I’d take them places,” and the two friends enjoyed going together to a Spanish prayer group at St. Clare’s Catholic Church.

Gangs were likely involved in the string of arson attacks, police said, and they come amid mounting concerns in Sweden about gang-related violence. More than 40 people were shot and killed in the Nordic country last year, and the prime minister said in January that he was not ruling out a military response to gang activity.

A rooftop camera recorded the silver Ford Fiesta driving past Parliament and suddenly veering sharply to the left, striking cyclists waiting at a set of lights, then crossing the road and crashing into a barrier outside Parliament. Armed police surrounded the car within seconds, pulling a man from the vehicle. Police said the driver was alone and no weapons were...